Return OUR YEAR OF
September 14, 2020 / Opening remarks for the academic year BY HEADMASTER WILLIAM L. BURKE III
I
selected The Return of the Prodigal Son—A Story of Homecoming by Henri J.M. Nouwen as our All-School Read last spring when we were 100% engaged in distance teaching and learning. Soon afterward, the word Return all but presented itself as our year’s theme. Before last week, we hadn’t held a class on our campus since March 12. Return we devoutly hoped and return we happily have, thanks be to the grace of God and to the generosity and heroic efforts of our Board of Trustees, our faculty and staff, and many other members of our St. Sebastian’s family who have so freely and fully cooperated with God’s grace. We all feel truly blessed and so very, very grateful. If we hope to continue to offer on-campus education, we simply must step up our commitment to the safety precautions laid out in the St. Sebastian’s School COVID Compact. We know that it is the weekend congregation of large numbers of people that shuts down schools and communities. Mitigating the risk of transmission is everyone’s responsibility, and it’s a seven day a week day and night job. We are one and we need everyone to work together in harmony. No one knows how long it will be before we can gather without masks. The future is unknown. All we have is the present. Let us resolve to live each present moment freely, fully, and safely. To focus us on the present, I offer this passage from C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. The speaker is Screwtape, the devil writing to a devil in training. The Enemy to whom the devil refers is God. You got that? It’s a total reversal, but very instructive. Listen carefully: The demon Screwtape writes: The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of 16 |
ST. SEBASTIAN’S MAGAZINE
it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present—either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure. Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. With this in view, we sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity. It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.
The present is all lit up with eternal rays. Oh, man, do I love that line. We have this moment, guys. We have God. We have our families. We have one another. How blessed are we? As I mentioned last week, if we all behave as though we have COVID, we will take all of the necessary safety precautions, for we live for the Lord and for one another and not for ourselves alone.
